Idaho's Weekly Journal of Local & National Commentary Week
2815

Did the Founding Fathers make a huge mistake in creating three branches of
government instead of just two? Think about it. Since we already have the
rules spelled out in the Constitution and Bill of Rights regarding our
rights and freedoms, what’s really left for Congress to do except to create
tons and tons of conflicting special interest legislation that infringes
upon our freedoms?

Where did the Founding Fathers go wrong? Or did they?

Washington,
DC – Let’s discuss the basic structure of the government of the United
States and – in light of our 2nd Great Depression and increasing
governmental intrusion into the life of the individual -- ask an important
question: namely, has the U.S. Congress morphed into an anachronism? Has
Congress outgrown its original purpose as one of the three “checks and balances” of government?
Specifically, has the U.S. Congress turned into exactly the type of
authoritarian and corrupt entity against which we fought a Revolutionary War
for Independence in the 1700s?

Time for a
brief History review. Listen up, girl friends.

233 years
ago, the Founding Fathers of America broke away from a despotic form of
government in Britain called a Monarchy and established their own form of
government called a limited Republic.
Our Forefathers did not create a Democracy
with 51% majority rule. They created a limited
Republic. What’s the difference? A Democracy with 51% Majority Rule is the
exact antithesis of the concept of inherent individual rights and freedoms.
Inherent means we obtain our rights
and freedoms from Nature, not from the government. Limited means that our Republic is
constrained, meaning, it: (1) prohibits
infringements upon individual rights, and (2) confers upon the U.S. Congress certain limited
authority to pass legislation by democratic majority rule, as long as said legislation does not infringe upon
(1) above.

And that is the key: as long as said legislation does not infringe upon
our inherent precursor rights.

These
concepts (1) the source of our
inherent rights, i.e. Nature not government, and (2) a limited Republic are important to
understand: Congress cannot infringe upon precursor rights of the people
that brought about the creation and the very existence of Congress in the
first place, and, in the second place, Congress cannot use the limited
duties granted to it by the people to infringe upon the explicit or implied
provisions of the U.S. Constitution. In street talk, Congress can’t dump on
those who brought it into existence – unless Congress has become
Frankenstein but that’s another movie.

In short,
Congress was not created to be our master; Congress is supposed to be our
servant, the protector of the rules, the laws, – not enforcer, that’s the
job of the Executive and Judicial branches -- governing our inherent rights
obtained at birth. Today, however, Congress has morphed into what could
minimally be described as an expensive snotty little brat throwing temper
tantrums on the floor of Capitol Hill. Somebody, I suggest WE the people,
needs to collectively spank Congress’ collectivist little butts.

I digress,
but back to the scene of the crime.

The
explicit protections of individual rights are enumerated in, but not limited
to, that portion of the U.S. Constitution we call the Bill of Rights.
Protected rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights are not to be mistaken as
the only rights of the individual. All other rights not specified belong to
the individual, not the government. In fact, Madison and Jefferson were
loathe to even create an explicit Bill of Rights since it was clear in their
minds that all mutually non-infringing
individual rights and freedoms are automatically obtained at birth and do not need to be specified over and over in a Constitution since
all rights spring forth from the same philosophical source: inherent
individual freedom. As Madison said, this would be redundant. And he was
right. However, many of the states in the 13 colonies had their own Bill of
Rights and forced the inclusion of an explicit bill of individual rights in
the new U.S. Constitution – fearing a future federal government would stomp
on our major freedoms if they were not explicitly stated. And it appears
they were right, too. Thus, the 13 colonies wouldn’t ratify the new U.S.
Constitution and dump the old Articles of Confederation unless it included
an explicit Bill of Rights. Hesto presto, we got a Bill of Rights.

In
addition to protection of individual, not the collective’s, rights, the U.S.
Constitution conferred certain limited authorities and duties to the
Congress in Article I. So we have two important areas, based upon two
important fundamental concepts, to think about: inherent rights of the
individual and specific
duties of Congress.

Fast
forward to today, year 2009.

We now
have a U.S. Congress that appears to be totally corrupt, with out-of-control
spending, and illegally ceding power to the Executive Branch of
government – thus, subverting intra-governmental “checks and balances,” and, even worse,
ceding power to a private corporation that
controls and manipulates our U.S. Dollar, a private corporation
called the Federal Reserve central bank. As you will see below, Congress
has misinterpreted their Constitutional duty to
“regulate the value of our COIN, which must be gold or silver, by law”
– as the authority to dump their job onto a private central bank.
Unfortunately, this is the root cause of our
current Depression and was also the
root cause of our first Depression in the 1920’s and 1930’s.

As a
result, the United States – because of Congress’ corruption and failure to
do its Constitutional job -- is on the verge of morphing into some type of
centrally-controlled collectivist government. President Barack Obama,
smelling the blood of a socialist opportunity and playing upon this default
by Congress, is moving in for the kill with a zillion Executive Orders and
independently-appointed Czars that bypass Congress’ Constitutional
confirmation process. Whether one calls the new state collectivism of 2009
socialism, fascism, guild socialism, communism, a totalitarian dictatorship,
Obama’s Marxist Follies or your favorite term for Big Brother, it is clear
that Americans do not now live in a limited Republic or even a strict
Democratic Majority Rule. We live in a collectivist Welfare State. The
type of state collectivism or the name we give to it is beside the point.
And it is growing rapidly, like a cancer infecting the U.S. Constitution and,
therefore, the freedoms of all Americans.

The fact
is that the U.S. Constitution is now on its death bed and we are caught in a
philosophical war between The Individual vs. The Collective. We do not live in a free market
economy, capitalism is all but dead, and the U.S. Congress has ceded so much
of its obligations and Constitutional authority to other branches of government,
to other bureaucracies, and even
to a private central bank, the Federal Reserve monetary manipulators, that
the question must now be asked:

Has Congress outlived its usefulness as one of our government’s three "checks
and balances?"

In other
words, has the U.S. Congress become an anachronism, out of step and out of
time with the provisions of the U.S. Constitution?

Now that
we have seen what the U.S. Congress has evolved into -- a corrupt body of
special interest peddlers selling power and doling out money to the highest
bidders at a federal pig trough of Deficit Spending for their Giant Welfare
State -- it begs the philosophical question:
did we really need a legislative branch of government in the first place?

Let’s face it, once the Rules of the Game are enacted, i.e., the U.S.
Constitution and Bill of Rights, why did we need a legislative branch of
government that has the capacity to continually change the rules?
Especially in the middle of the game? Was this a naïve oversight by our
Founding Fathers, i.e. creating three branches of government after already
spelling out the Rules in a Rule Book called the Constitution? What was the
intended function of a body of Representatives and Senators? To make minor
changes and keep track of the nation’s limited budget and expenditures, or
to continually change The Basic Rules of the Game to implement thousands of
new laws, taxes, and power plays to run roughshod over the individual rights
and freedoms of the American people?

In short,
did our Forefathers make a fatal mistake when they created a federal
Congress? Did they not know what Congress would morph into, given the
nature of mankind, and given the knowledge of inflated, Revolutionary War
paper indebtedness that was created by bankers for our Continental Congress?

At first
glance, one might come to the conclusion that, yes indeed, our Forefathers
did commit a huge mistake by creating three branches of government instead
of just two: (1) an Executive Branch to enforce the Rules, (2) a Judicial
Branch to objectively interpret the Rules, and, unfortunately, (3) a
Legislative Branch to change the basic Rules in the middle of The Game.

I
mean, why have a third branch of government whose function is to continually
CHANGE the Rules, especially in the middle of The Game? Isn’t this like
changing the rules in the middle of a chess match or allowing the refs at
the Super Bowl to participate in the game itself and, like Congress in the
free market, play quarterback in the 4th quarter? (What do you
think a protectionist tariff against free trade is, if not Congress breaking
the Rules and participating in the free market? What do you think a
state-granted monopoly on selling health insurance within each of 39 states
is -- thus driving up profits for individual health insurance companies and
providing a future excuse for President Barack Obama to exclaim, with no
hint of pretentiousness, “Wow, ain’t private health insurance
expensive, dudes,” so he can then push a nationalized health care agenda
down all Americans’ throats by pretending that the government needs to step
in and compete with subsidies against the very insurance monopolies created
by previous intervention into the market by Congress? One
governmental intervention usually leads to a thousand other interventions
and a million unintended consequences.)

However,
upon closer scrutiny of the U.S. Constitution and Federalist Papers – the
Federalist Papers being the writings of the authors of the Constitution
explaining their reasons for including specific sections in the Constitution
-- we discover that our Founding Fathers were perhaps not that naïve or as
careless as we, at first, might think. They just never comprehended how
future technology and state collectivist ideology would allow greedy bankers
to take us off the one thing that the Founding Fathers counted on not
changing: namely, removal of the gold standard and enacting fractional
reserve banking. (Fractional Reserve banking is simply a hundred dollar
term for “counterfeiting.”)

There is
one very important provision in the U.S. Constitution that our Founders
expected us to carry out, a provision that would automatically prevent the
U.S. Congress from (1) spending beyond its means by deficit financing and
inflating our money, and (2) creating special interest legislation that
grants power and money to all sorts of special interest groups.

What was
that provision that our Forefathers put in Article I of the U.S.
Constitution to prevent Congress from becoming corrupt and spending us into
bankruptcy?

That
provision was the establishment of sound money, gold and silver coin, not
paper but hard specie commodity money, so that nobody, not politicians, not
private bankers, not anybody could use paper currency – especially inflated
paper currency -- to take over the new Republic.

Within the
three pages of Article I of the U.S. Constitution that lays out the
legislative powers vested in Congress is Section (8) POWERS OF CONGRESS,
paragraphs (5) and (6), which state, “Congress
shall have the power to (5)coinmoney, regulate the value thereof, and of foreigncoin, andfix the standard of weights and measures
[especially of coin], and (6) provide for thepunishment of counterfeiting the securities and
current coinof the United States.

Guess
what? Congress has violated both of these paragraphs vested in them and our
lawmakers have given the power to manipulate our U.S. Dollar to a private
corporation of central bankers called the Federal Reserve.

And what
has the Federal Reserve done?

The
Federal Reserve has taken America off the gold standard, a violation of the
above legislative duties granted to Congress to retain coinage as a
standard, i.e. a hard specie commodity as our monetary standard. Congress
and the Fed Reserve have debased our coins from gold and silver to
copper-nickel. In addition, the Federal Reserve has removed the contractual words of gold and silver
backing and convertibility of our paper certificates, thus
obliterating the difference between the concepts of (1) gold and silver coin
as money and (2) the paper dollar as a receipt, which is a contract, for the
storage and redeemability of that coinage. In fact, today’s Federal Reserve
Notes are not real money, in direct violation of the U.S. Constitution and
in direct violation of the limited Powers granted to Congress.

Our current paper dollars are simply counterfeited
fractional reserve notes not backed by anything. Worse still, by
transferring power over our money supply to a private central bank, Congress
has thus made itself an anachronism. By this one action alone, Congress has
made itself totally irrelevant as a third branch of government, especially
regarding “checks and balances.” In fact, Congress in 2009 has now morphed
into the equivalent of the British Parliament of Whores, the special
interest group of Royals, of the 1700’s against whom we fought for our
Independence. We are essentially back to Square One. And that’s why many
Americans are now calling for a 2nd American Revolution by
peaceably marching on Washington, DC, and demanding an audit of the Federal
Reserve and a return to the original monetary provisions of the U.S.
Constitution.

Within the
same Article I of the U.S. Constitution, Section (9) POWERS DENIED CONGRESS,
paragraph (7) states that “No money shall be drawn
from the treasury [remember this was intended to be gold and silver
coins or gold and silver certificates], but in
consequence of appropriations made by law [not secret appropriations
by a private central bank]; and a regular
statement and account of the receipts and expenditures of all public money
shall be published from time to time.”

Guess what
again? The Federal Reserve has NEVER, EVER, since its illegal inception in
1913, been audited. At least not for anything more than how many paper
clips did Suzy the receptionist purchase last month.

Even
today, Fed Reserve Chief Ben Bernanke has stated that it is not the business
of Congress or the people to know where trillions and trillions of inflated
paper dollars were expended, who got them, what they were used for, how much
interest was charged, or any details whatsoever. Why? Bernanke says that
accountability to the public would create a, “systemic risk” to the economy.

Really? A
“systemic risk” to our economy? That’s funny, the Constitution doesn’t say
our public debt should be kept secret from the people. In fact, if it’s OUR
debt, and we have to pay interest on it, then we have a right to know. Can
you imagine your neighbor assuming your identity, spending the crap out of
your plastic credit cards, running it into millions of dollars of secret
expenditures, and then telling you that you don’t have a right to know why,
how and what he’s doing with YOUR money that you have not even authorized
him to spend? What arrogance by the Federal Reserve!

So, we are
told by a secret central bank inflating our National Debt and secretly
shoveling the money out all over the place without our knowledge that we
don’t have a need to know and that by revealing their secret expenditures
the economy might collapse all around our ears? Errrt, screech. Whose
money is this anyway, the Federal Reserve’s or the people of America?

Once
again, our Founding Fathers expected Congress to keep us on a gold standard
with no fractional reserve banking and thus “no
money would be drawn from the Treasury without lawful appropriations”
and “regular statements shall be published.”

Thirdly,
in Section 10 of Article I, POWERS DENIED THE STATES, it says that (1)
“No state shall … coin money; emit bills of
credit; or make anything but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of
debts; … or pass any law impairing the obligation of contracts,” the
latter of which means neither Congress or the illegal Federal Reserve can
pass a law or statute -- or just plain go out and do it – that changes the
contractual wording on lawful U.S. paper money, such that it is now not
redeemable in gold or silver coin to the bearer upon demand at any U.S.
Treasury. The real meaning of this clause is not just that the states cannot
create money, it also means that the Feds can’t crank up money for the
states, fork it over as earmarks or whatever other Great Train Robbery you
want to call it, and thus get around the provisions of Article I, Section
(10), paragraph (1).

In
reality, the Federal Reserve Note is not lawful money because it is not gold
or silver or a convertible gold or silver certificate as required by the
U.S. Constitution in Article I, Sections (8), (9), and (10), and the U.S.
Congress has illegally authorized a private corporation, the Federal
Reserve, to impair an obligation of U.S. monetary contracts, the U.S.
Dollar, i.e. by removing the contractual redeemability wording on U.S. gold
and silver certificates. Removing these words constitutes an “impairment of
contracts,” or in current legalese, a “fraudulent contract.” In street talk
it’s called “a freakin robbery.”

Therefore,
we come back to the original question: has the U.S. Congress morphed into
an anachronism? Were the Founding Fathers mistaken to have created three
branches of government, specifically a legislative branch of government,
since Congress has no other function today than to continually crank out
tons and tons of new special interest legislation, the function of which is
to continually change the Rules of the Game and allow a runaway central bank
to fund its creation of a Deficit Welfare State?

In short,
did our Forefathers screw up by creating a U.S. Congress?

The answer
is: Yes and No.

Yes, in
that our Forefathers naively trusted
that a future group of legislators – today’s Gang of 535 -- would never give
away their monetary powers to a private central banking corporation that
most free market economists will admit had a huge hand in creating today’s
Greater Depression – as well as the first Great Depression in the 1930s -- by going off
the gold standard, inflating the U.S. Dollar, and granting itself powers
never intended by our Founding Fathers. We’re talking about powers that
stretch into setting wage rates for CEOs of private companies, controlling
market interest rates, nationalizing car, insurance, banking, and health
care companies, injecting inflated non-backed U.S. Bonds and Dollars into
member banks who then create fanciful and clever toxic derivatives to sell
as fake “securitized” hedge funds on Wall Street.

And the
other answer, No, in that our Founding Fathers
never thought Congress would go crazy and go off the gold standard.
Our Forefathers put the cautions and stops into Article I, Sections (8),
(9), and (10) of the U.S. Constitution to prevent the atrocities of a group
of Banksters from essentially taking over the United States by controlling
and manipulating our monetary system but Congress over the years has long
since defaulted on their duties and obligations to protect and defend the
Constitution of the United States. Especially in the area of money, which
virtually none of our legislators understand.

While
everybody is kept busy choosing up sides, Republicans and Democrats, in this
War of Congress and the Fed Reserve against the people, Americans are
rapidly losing all of their rights and freedoms to a Big Brother government
who continually claims it must save us all from some unknown “systemic risk”
and a mysterious Depression that flew in from Mars or just appeared out of
nowhere for incomprehensible reasons -- when, in fact, the real reasons are
already known: Congress has dumped its Constitutional monetary authority
into the hands of a private central bank and thus turned America into a
giant Welfare State with everybody only arguing about who gets how much
inflated paper money from the federal government as fake “stimulus” money to
finance their favorite socialist program. Nobody discusses the fact that
these actions constitute a usurpation of everybody’s private property rights
to their own minds, bodies, and the fruits of their own production.
Redistributionist consumption of other people’s private property through
Congressional and Executive Let’s Spread the Wealth programs is now the name
of The Game.

Government
redistributionists such as President Barack Obama claim their Progressive
socialist programs are “compassionate.” But being “compassionate” with
other people’s money is not compassion; it is out and out robbery. It is
enslavement of the very people who are the inventors, the discoverers, the
producers of wealth, and not just quantitatively but, more importantly,
qualitative wealth. On the other side of consumers are the producers. It
is the producers that the Progressives, the redistributionists, hate.

And this
is the dirty little secret that governmental redistributionists such as
President Barack Obama and his socialist cronies do not want you to know:
the surest way to fundamentally change America from a free market economy to
Marxist socialism is to control the U.S. monetary system with inflated fiat
currency. Marx knew this. Stalin knew this. Hitler knew this. FDR knew
this. And Barack Obama knows this. All state collectivists know this and
that is why the first thing that Progressives and Totalitarian Dictators all
know they must do is: dump the gold standard and grant monetary
manipulation powers to a secretly-run government central bank.

So, the
real answer to our initial question:

Has the U.S.
Congress become an anachronism?

is that as
long as our U.S. Congress is allowed to illegally delegate its monetary
authority to a group of private central bankers, the Federal Reserve, then
Congress has become the very Monstrosity of Government Corruption for which
we fought an American Revolution to prevent. By dumping its limited and
specific duty to regulate America’s money as gold and silver coin, not
allowing anything else to become lawful money, to provide an accounting of
expenditures and appropriations to the public, and to provide for punishment
for counterfeiting U.S. coin and currency and punishment for “impairment of
contracts” of our paper monetary receipts, our U.S. paper dollars, today’s
U.S. Congress is no different than King George’s Parliament of Special
Interest Royals in 1700 Britain.

Until one
of Congress’ most important checks and balances
– its proper monetary authority as stated in Article I of the U.S.
Constitution – is reigned back in and our central bank, the Federal Reserve,
is divested of its insane money manipulation powers – and, in fact,
abolished -- we will have continual boom-bust cycles, inflation of our pulp
fiction money supply, inflation of the price of all goods and services with
alternating deflation of the same, and eventually the complete loss of
control of our own government by the people of the United Sates.

Until
Congress returns to a sound monetary system, it is nothing but an
anachronistic cancer of corruption. -- FM Duck